Galaxy Corporation Stages Humanoid Robot Show in New York

On September 21 local time, the UN International Day of Peace, humanoid robots in spacesuits took the stage at the Loft and Garden, the rooftop garden of Rockefeller Center in New York. They danced in tight unison to Rosé of Blackpink's "APT." and Psy's "Gangnam Style," and local influencers could not look away. Galaxy Corporation, which staged the event, had also put 17 robots in the middle of Times Square two days earlier, on the 19th, for a flash mob carrying the message "One World, One Peace."

The company is a talent agency whose roster includes the singers G-Dragon and Taemin, the actor Song Kang-ho and the Major League Baseball player Lee Jung-hoo. It was co-founded in 2019 with capital of 1 million won. It has recently been valued at more than 1 trillion won and has raised about 200 billion won in investment to date, and in its sixth year it posted revenue of 298.9 billion won and operating profit of 12.5 billion won last year. It sits at the midpoint of a move from talent agency to robot company.

The stage is already running on a permanent schedule. At the 16,500-square-metre Galaxy Robot Park in Godeok, Seoul, humanoid robots have been performing in the costumes of the agency's singers since July, and cumulative visitors have passed 20,000. Choi Yong-ho, chief executive of Galaxy Corporation, said the company had first conceived the performances as free on the assumption that demand would be limited. "After hearing from U.S. exchange officials that the business looked promising, we actually sold tickets, and as many as 1,000 visitors a day come in," he said. He added, "Children will watch content they enjoyed once 10 times, 100 times over."

The robots themselves are bought in. The units the company uses are made by the Chinese firm Unitree. METAL has reported that Unitree's cumulative humanoid production passed 18,000 units, and what Galaxy Corporation sells is not the machine but the choreography, the costumes and the names of its artists layered on top of it.

At the New York event the company also unveiled a humanoid robot modelled on Choi's own likeness, named "Scofield Stein." Choi said the robot's purpose was "to raise the question of communication between robots and humans, of an artificial intelligence with a soul." Asked why he staged the event, he said, "By 2035, when my son, who is six this year, turns 15, robots will be a natural part of daily life," and said the performance carried a wish for peace and coexistence, for robots to live alongside his son and look after him.

An agency transferring the faces of its people onto machines is also a matter of contracts. Choi said some of the agency's roster had agreed on a non-commercial basis to have robots made in their likeness, and that he expected to announce one such robot each month. The word consent carries weight here. The idol industry has long treated faces, voices and movements as assets a company manages, and once those assets can leave a human body and repeat six times a day in a permanent venue, the line between labour and licence gets redrawn. According to reports, this wave is unfolding amid growing concern from fans and regulators about what AI does to creativity and authenticity.

The expansion plan is already on the map. The company has said it will open a second Robot Park in Dubai within this year and install venues in the United States and Japan within three to six months. A New York Robot Park is targeted for early next year at the earliest. On Halloween, October 31, it plans to unveil a limited-edition robot of its own making, and in January it is preparing a robot idol debut. Choi said, "We will open an era in which robot idols can perform on stages around the world simultaneously," and stressed that robots would have capabilities beyond the physical limits of human idols.

That word simultaneously captures the arithmetic of this business most precisely. A human idol's world tour has to move city by city in sequence, and that sequence is the ceiling on revenue. If the same choreography can run in ten cities at the same hour, the ceiling disappears, and so does scarcity. For those whose reason to attend was that this person was in this room, what remains has not yet been answered.

The listing plan has also changed direction. The company had been preparing for a Kosdaq listing and recently switched its target to an initial public offering in the United States. In the first half of this year, Nasdaq Vice Chairman Bob McCooey and New York Stock Exchange Vice Chairman Michael Harris visited the company's offices and showed strong interest in a business that combines entertainment with robotics, and the plan is to list Korean depositary receipts at home once the U.S. listing succeeds. Choi said this Times Square flash mob was itself the realisation of an idea McCooey had floated casually. Underwriters are to be selected and announced late this year or early next.

METAL checked Galaxy Corporation's official newsroom and found no announcement of its own about the New York event, only a collection of links to press coverage. The story the company puts out into the world is still being assembled through reporting.

On this path from agency to robot company, what actually sells is not technology but familiarity. The difference between the same Unitree machine being a worker in a factory and an idol on a Rockefeller Center rooftop comes from which songs and which names are layered onto it. K-pop built those names by accumulating practice, narrative and the time of its fandoms, and what is being tested now is whether that accumulation transfers once it leaves a human body. That 1,000 people a day buy tickets and that children rewatch the same show ten times is not the answer to that question, but evidence that the question has started being asked in a real market.